Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion
Allen Lane 768pp £35 The Week Bookshop £30 (incl. p&p)
When Karl Marx died in 1883, only 11 people attended his funeral, said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. Outside a “tiny circle of left-wing radicals”, nobody took his ideas seriously. Yet by the 1920s, they’d helped inspire revolutions around the world and millions saw him as the “secular equivalent of a God”. In Karl Marx, Gareth Stedman Jones attempts to rescue the man from the “myth-making of the 20th century”. While the Marx invoked by communist revolutionaries was a thinker of “merciless consistency”, the man himself was an “anxious, sickly, flawed human being” who frequently changed his mind and never even finished his masterpiece, Das Kapital. “Dauntingly impressive” and “relentlessly high-minded”, this is a work of “old-fashioned intellectual history”. While academics are sure to enjoy it, general readers may find it “frustratingly austere”; one yearns for more personal details, such as the boils on Marx’s bottom that Francis Wheen chronicled with such relish in his earlier biography.
Marx was born to well-off parents in the town of Trier, western Prussia, in 1818, said Oliver Bullough in The Observer. His first ambition was to be an academic, but by his late 20s he was a communist, and his radicalism made this impossible. Instead, he became a journalist, working in Cologne and Paris. Having been carried across Western Europe by the revolutionary upheavals of 1848, he settled in London the following year. There, Friedrich Engels, another German émigré, became both his collaborator and financial backer. Much of what we think of as Marxism, Stedman Jones argues, was in fact created by Engels, who “codified” his friend’s theories after his death.
Much about this “rich and deeply researched” portrait of Marx is “interestingly different”, said John Gray in the Literary Review. For example, Stedman Jones is unusually blunt about Marx’s “complicated relationship with his Jewish ancestry”: his father converted to Lutheranism, and he often made “catty antiSemitic jibes”. The book aims to put Marx back in his 19th century context, said Mark Mazower in the Financial Times. But it also asks what “his value is for us today”; and argues that he remains an “outstanding model” of how to critique capitalism. Communism may have failed, but it can scarcely be said that contemporary capitalism has succeeded. Marx shows how to “think about the world as a whole for the sake of its betterment” – and this book is an “admirable guide to how he did it”.